Archive for April, 2012

Seen on the interwebs: Men are like Bluetooth; and women are like Wi-Fi. Women are like Wi-Fi because she sees all available devices and connects with the strongest one; and men are like Bluetooth because they connect to the device they are near to; and seek to connect to another device if the first one is not near.

Now, this is intended as satire that contains a kernel of truth; so one does not need to go all Vulcan about it. One needs to ruminate on this because that kernel of truth is ignored at the cost that comes with ignoring any truth. You will be happier as a man in a relationship if you are strong; and so will she. She will be happy if she can rest in the quality and durability of the connection she has with you; and you want in your soul to be able to trust both her and yourself.

Notions like forgiveness and mercy are different things than the notion of “good ignoring skills.” Good ignoring skills are a useful tool for any single Christian man; though like any tool it can be turned to evil purpose. Even simple incompetence with this tool can enable you to crush a brother warrior; so be careful with it. But used well it is a good complement to your set of tools — it can keep you, for example, from doing someone else’s work for them; which is bad for both of you. But the take away here is that “good ignoring skills” is a different thing than either mercy or forgiveness.

A woman whose conception of her life with God is one of talking with her friends at church and emoting about her feelings with them is going to take the same conception of God — and more importantly, her duty towards Him — into any God ordained activity, such as marriage. Whether she thinks of it this way or not is immaterial. If she fundamentally believes that God’s understanding of what her duty is to Him is to talk with her friends in church about her feelings about things, this is what she is going to bring into battle with you against your adversaries.

If you have come out of established Christianity of one sort or the other as a child; you may have been impregnated,so to speak; through and through with a kind of legalistic urgency about matters of faith as they were understood so by those who raised you or who taught you – or both. The meta-theme that gets impressed into your thinking is something like “God is significant, and so other things are not.” When a college mega-ministry that has since collapsed was committing acts of spiritual tyranny by telling its members things like “language study is temporal, but bible study is eternal” they were exhibiting an extreme example of this kind of behavior. A church that boots you for asking questions about tithing rather than answering your questions honestly and resting in this does the same; as would be a church that sends you away for not complying with a church mandated “courtship” scheme in which various elders presume to speak for who should be spending time with whom. By their actions they are essentially letting the cat out of the bag: That they want your relationship to be with the “body” – i.e. their ministry — rather than with Christ.

The take-away: The real truth is closer to this: Because God is real and can be an active partner in your ongoing story, everything is significant.

The HIV virus, which is the causative agent for the disease in humans called AIDS, is a nasty little pest. It works its mayhem in the host by causing that very part of it, the immune system, to pump out copies of itself. The body thinks it is doing its proper work instead of hastening its end.

The take-away idea for this Credo: Your adversary is going to try to defeat you by getting you to do the work for him. Perhaps bad theology being a harsh taskmaster; perhaps your own rationalization of bad decisions that are yours to make and not another’s. Your own arrogance. Your own physical or emotional untempered appetites which have the potential to rule you in a moment when your hindbrain is doing the driving instead of your cerebrum – God gave you both for different kinds of situations, of course. It could be someone else’s actions and words that devastate you; I am not promoting a Hegelian idea that you should be a strong and isolated Island. I am saying that you need a healthy immune system in the metaphorically spiritual way (and, of course, in the physical 🙂 ). You don’t want your “immune” system turned against you.

The idea of calling one’s body “Brother Ass” comes from Francis of Assisi; who said this in the context of describing his body as being an ass; i.e. a stubborn animal that needed to be controlled; a fine idea.

This Credo amplifies this idea a bit and reinforces the idea that your body is God-given to you. The take-away idea here is that the location of your sin nature is not in your physical body – though controlling your body and not being ruled by its appetites is a necessary spiritual discipline. The idea that the body’s appetites – hunger, exercise, sleep, the pursuit of a mate, and so forth — are inherently evil is subtle. You may protest that you have never heard this told from a pulpit; but on reflection I think you will say that the last appetite mentioned is one that is in fact treated as evil in itself; male in se. Your sin nature can be expressed by the actions of the body; don’t hear what I am not saying. Hear rather what I am saying.